Bond purists may well have been offended by the spy’s supposed choice of vermouth in Diamonds are Forever, that showed Sean Connery in the bath with a Martini bottle beside the taps. In Ian Fleming’s novel of 1956, Bond declares the Californian brand Cresta Blanca to be “the best vermouth I’ve ever tasted”. Unfortunately for the producers of the 1971 film, the Cresta Blanca winery shut in 1965.

In a repeat of Friends, the actor David Schwimmer sat at a table, a box of Oreo biscuits at his elbow. They did not appear in the original episode but were added when the show was released on DVD.

In 1982 Pepsi introduced Free, a no-caffeine cola. In 1985 Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future gave it a plug in a scene in which, walking into a bar having leapt 30 years back in time, Marty McFly says: “Give me a Pepsi Free.” The barman growled: “You want a Pepsi, pal, you’re going to pay for it.”

Lexus, the carmaker, was said to have paid $5 million and Nokia, the mobile phone manufacturer, $2 million for futuristic takes on their products to appear in Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, which is set 50 years in the future. Although the film features hellish advertisements that leap out of billboards to hector passers-by, companies liked the implication that their brands would last so long.

The 30 million US fans of the talent show American Idol will see Simon Cowell and his fellow judges on a grey and blue set with, standing out like beacons on the desk in front of them, red Coca-Cola pint pots. When ITV2 broadcasts the show, the logo will have to be be illegible.

PR companies for brands including Smirnoff and Stolichnaya vodka, Heineken, Cadillac and US Airways arranged for the names of their products to be dropped into the script of the US drama Mad Men.

A loophole permitting producers to accept donations of props has long allowed surreptitious product placement on British television. A Sunday Times investigation in 1999 found a Saab car in EastEnders and a Zanussi dishwasher with an unusually large logo in Absolutely Fabulous.

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